MoltenVK is a software library which allows Vulkan applications to run on top of Metal on Apple's macOS and iOSoperating systems. It is the first software component to be released for the Vulkan Portability Initiative, a project to have a subset of Vulkan run on platforms which lack native Vulkan drivers. There are some limitations compared with a native Vulkan implementation.
History
MoltenVK was first released as a proprietary and commercially licensed product on July 27, 2016. On July 31, 2017, Khronos announced the formation of the Vulkan Portability Technical Subgroup. On February 26, 2018, Khronos announced that Vulkan became available on macOS and iOS products through the MoltenVK library. Valve announced that Dota 2 will run on macOS using the Vulkan API with the aid of MoltenVK, and that they had made an arrangement with developer The Brenwill Workshop Ltd to release MoltenVK as open-source software under the Apache License version 2.0. On May 30, 2018, Qt was updated with Vulkan for Qt on macOS using MoltenVK. On May 31, 2018, optional Vulkan support for Dota 2 on macOS was released. Benchmarks for the game were available the following day, showing better performance using Vulkan and MoltenVK compared to OpenGL. On July 20, 2018, Wine was updated with Vulkan support on macOS using MoltenVK. On 29 July 2018, the first app using MoltenVK was accepted onto the App Store, after initially being rejected. On 6 August 2018, Google open-sourced Filament, a crossplatform real-timephysically based rendering engine with MoltenVK for macOS/iOS. On November 28, 2018, Valve released Artifact, their first Vulkan-only game on macOS using MoltenVK. On 29 January 2019, MoltenVK 1.0.32 was released with early prototype of Vulkan Portability Extensions. RPCS3 and Dolphin emulators were updated with Vulkan support on macOS using MoltenVK. On 13 April 2019, MoltenVK 1.0.34 was released with support for tessellation. On July 30, 2019, MoltenVK 1.0.36 was released targeting Metal 3.0.
